


Home at Last

by ant5b



Category: DuckTales (Cartoon 2017)
Genre: Show-canon wendigo myth, aftermath of Spear of Selene AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-06 00:25:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16821454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ant5b/pseuds/ant5b
Summary: 𝑊𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑔𝑜𝑠.𝑃𝑜𝑜𝑟 𝑠𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑠 𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑜 𝑚𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑏𝑦 𝑜𝑏𝑠𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑑𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛.Five months after Della stole the Spear of Selene, Scrooge McDuck disappeared.





	Home at Last

Donald gets the call at eight on a Sunday morning. 

He’s preoccupied with preparing the boys’ breakfast and heating up formula on the stove so he answers his phone without thinking, and doesn’t check the caller ID. 

“Yeah, hello?” he says, checking the temperature of the first bottle of formula. 

“Donald?” 

He’s so startled by the hesitant British voice that he upends the entire bottle of formula on the counter. 

“Mrs. B?” he responds incredulously as he hurries to mop up the spill. “What do you-I mean, why are you calling?”

Donald has nothing against Mrs. Beakley personally. Though she tried to dissuade him from leaving the mansion all those months ago, she’d also helped him pack up his station wagon when he’d made up his mind. But simply through by her association with his uncle, Donald doesn’t really want anything to do with her. He half expects the first thing out of her mouth to be asking him to come back, though it’s five months and two weeks too late. 

But Beakley is quiet on the other end of the line, for so long that Donald checks to see that the call hasn’t been disconnected. 

“Mrs. B?” he repeats.

He hears her take a breath. “Apologies,” she says, but her usual calm sounds frayed. “It’s been a hectic few...months.”

Donald sticks his cell phone between his ear and shoulder, moving to the fridge to get a new bottle of formula. “Uh huh,” he replies, for lack of anything else to say. Same here? In the span of a day I became a single parent of three, and even now, five months down the line, I’m still afraid of doing something wrong. 

“Donald,” Beakley snaps, and that’s the Beakley he knows because with one word she has him standing at attention. “Your uncle has been missing for two weeks.”

The microwave starts to beep, but Donald doesn’t open it. A strange pressure is settling on his chest, making it difficult to breathe, to think clearly. 

“What do you mean ‘missing’?” he manages to ask. 

“I mean he was here one moment and gone the next,” Beakley retorts, and despite her anger, her voice shakes. Donald is reminded in that moment of her and Scrooge’s shared history, of how long Beakley has considered his uncle her friend. She wouldn’t be telling him this if it wasn’t serious. 

All the same, Donald scrambles for an explanation, some justification. “But-but this is Scrooge we’re talking about! Disappearing for days to discover an ancient civilization is what he does.”

“He wasn’t in any state to go gallivanting off on some adventure,” she counters, and for a second she sounds annoyed, like she did the time Scrooge insisted they scale the Andes when he had the flu. “He didn’t leave a note. A ransom hasn’t been issued, all his vehicles have been accounted for, and none of my contacts have seen him. The police have been involved, and…”

Beakley clears her throat, and Donald’s stomach falls to his feet in one sickening swoop. “He’s being officially considered a missing person. I thought you should know before it’s plastered all over the news tomorrow.” 

Donald’s head feels like it’s been filled with cotton. Some sharp, vindictive part of him sneers and says  _ good riddance.  _

Another part, the part that just wants things to go back to the the way they were, is immersed in golden memories of a childhood spent driving their uncle mad, of trust and a hand gripping his, the greatest adventuring team the world would ever see. He remembers Scrooge standing with pride, his arms around them and his great-nephews before him. 

His memory dwindles until, cold and gray, it settles on when he last saw his uncle, hunched over and small beneath the words, blinking and red,  _ transmission lost.  _

The microwave keeps beeping, but Donald has long-since fallen against the counter, and slumped to the ground. 

“I…” Donald starts, but realizes he has nothing to say. His eyes burn. 

“In his will, he left you and the children the mansion,” Beakley informs him, and he can hear her compose herself once more, layer after layer of defenses bricking themselves back up. “I don’t know when Mr. McDuck will be back, if he ever will, but I know that he would want you all here.”

Donald swallows, and musters a smile that probably looks wretched. “You sure this isn’t just a trick to get me to move back into the mansion?”

Beakley breathes a short laugh through her nose. “I wish.”

Donald sighs, scrubbing a hand down his face. It’s only eight in the morning but he’s already so tired. 

“Okay,” he says, because what else can he do. “Okay. I’ll get our stuff together. The boys and I will be there tomorrow.”

“Boys?” Beakley repeats quietly. A question. 

Numbly, Donald realized that he never told Scrooge the gender of Della’s children. At the time, he hadn’t thought his uncle deserved to know.

“Huey, Dewey, and Louie,” Donald tells her. He almost feels silly for keeping it a secret, for hoarding the boys’ names like so much treasure. 

“I can’t wait to meet them,” Beakley replies, quiet and bittersweet.

  
  
  


The news breaks that following morning, across every news channel in the country and a good number outside of it. 

_ THE RICHEST DUCK IN THE WORLD IS MISSING _

Glomgold’s being interviewed by half of those channels, boasting about being the new Richest Duck. The other half are focused on the collapsing stock market, pundits debating over who’ll take the reins of McDuck Enterprises, the goliath of all industry. Others are wondering whether the company will fall apart without its founder. 

Donald’s houseboat isn’t far from the mansion, but the drive seems to last ages rather than the twenty minutes it actually takes. 

He switches off the radio after realizing that the disappearance of his uncle is all anyone wants to talk about. Instead, he puts in one of the boys’ CDs, full of kids songs that he’ll normally sing along to at top volume to amuse them. 

He makes the slow climb up Killmotor Hill with “The Wheels on the Bus” playing inside his car, filled with a burgeoning sense of foreboding. He’s crammed his station wagon with boxes of the boys’ things and a few of his own, all of them packed in a haze of disillusionment. Nothing feels real as he drives back to what used to be his home. 

The front gate is chock full of reporters, though he doesn’t know what news they expect to get all the way down here. 

Though it seems like Beakley has invested some security in preparation for his arrival, judging by the four muscle-bound people in black suits keeping the crowds back. The youngest of them, a tall, red-haired duck, jogs up to Donald’s car. 

“Mr. Duck?” he confirms, when Donald lowers his window. The stranger spares a moment to smile at his boys in the backseat. 

At Donald’s nod, he turns back and gestures to the other three suits. 

One of them buzzes Donald in, and the gates open for him with a yawning creak. 

Donald takes a deep breath, and makes the rest of the drive up. 

  
  
  
  



End file.
